Mabel

Excerpts from a now deleted blog post from Juliana on her official site in 2008:

If you want to understand what I was thinking when I wrote “Mabel” you have to watch a movie called “A Woman Under The Influence.” I first discovered it when I was in my early twenties and every time I have seen it since, it has affected me very strongly, partly because of parallels between the film’s subject matter and my own life, and partly because it is just so heart wrenching.

When I sing ”Check out that lady, she’s talking to herself,” I am taking the attitude of a judgmental stranger observing someone like Mabel — someone who seems to be acting “funny”; who is not correctly composed in public, who is muttering things to herself; a woman who is jumping up and down, happy, so inappropriately happy, when she sees the school bus approaching with her kids on it. The onlooker sees a weirdo ( a beautiful weirdo, though [Gena Rowlands was so beautiful]) pacing back and forth, going from the sidewalk into the street and back again, but really she is just a woman wanting so badly to do the right thing, to be a good mother, at that moment, in the only way she knows. She may seem unstable or nuts or scary — her clothing, behaviour, mannerisms and speech are unconventional, without context or historical precedent —and though it may be easy and tempting to write her off as “batty” or “not normal” or “not like me,” she is one of us. She is someone, like you, with a family — with children and a husband and parents and in-laws and friends, all of whom worry like crazy about her and are baffled and torn-up and not sure what to do to help. They can see Mabel is in a lot of pain and that she is confused and agitated and that she can’t express it and that she fears others wouldn’t understand, and would maybe even condemn her, if she could make it clear to them what she is going through.